‘They laughed. “Those are Muslim dicks”, they said.
‘They killed them.
‘They killed them all.
‘Every one of them they killed.’
Machine gun fire rattled in the distance. Blood-bloated flies settled on my skin.
‘How can we please everyone?’ a woman cried.
‘We are Catholics,’ wailed another. ‘We told the soldiers that. We are Catholics. But they went on killing. They said that God would recognize his own.’
Sitting apart from everyone else huddled a young girl of twelve or thirteen. She was shivering violently, as if she was freezing even on this sweltering hot day. She was naked from the waist down. Her thighs were covered in blood…
The wailing mothers fell behind me. Their voices merged together once again into a fly-like drone.
It was the time of the Holy Wars, when the religions turned against one another. It was something that was bound to happen after the Reaction because, to true believers, those who believe in other faiths are a much greater threat than mere unbelievers. Unbelievers, after all, are just sinful people who refuse to hear the word of God. But the adherents of other faiths claim they have heard the word of God! They claim they have heard it saying different things, laying down different rules, dictating different holy books…
Bloody wars broke out in America between different Protestant factions. In Western Europe Catholics and Protestants engaged in medieval massacres. But in the Balkans, where different religions lived so much on top of one another, the struggle was the most merciless and intense. Catholics, Orthodox, Shias, Sunnis, Bektashis – and new and imported religions too that had blossomed in the interstices of the old ones during the ferment of the Reaction: Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists… All of them turned on one another without restraint or mercy.
I wandered through it seemingly unnoticed, as if I was a ghost, as if my life was charmed. I saw burning villages. I saw crosses daubed on walls in blood and crescents incised in human flesh. I saw bloated corpses rotting in the sun in the pockmarked ruins of mosques and churches.
By the quiet shores of Lake Shkodër, lying pure and smooth as a mirror under a pure blue sky, I even heard a crazy-eyed monk from Herzegovina preaching the Manichaean heresies of the Bogomili:
‘God created the spiritual world, but Satanal made the material universe and trapped the spirits in it, like a fisherman with a net. Everything you can see and hear and touch is evil and disgusting and vile. Even that blue lake, even those pretty mountains, they are tricks, evil, obscene tricks, made to ensnare you, made to confuse you and hide you from what you really are…’
Then some Illyrian aircraft came overhead, with our own emblem, the black-and-white eye, staring down coldly at the irrationality beneath.
It seemed to me that this was more than a war between different human factions. It was a war which Lucy too had fought, a war about the nature of existence itself, a war between body and spirit, appearance and essence: implacable enemies, yet so utterly entangled with one another that the boundaries could not be clearly distinguished, and everything turned out to be the opposite of what it seemed.
Everyone struggled to get to the bottom of things. Everyone also struggled at all costs to cling to the surface. Dervishes walked on burning coals, statues wept tears of blood, children saw visions of the Mother of God, bleeding penitents wore crowns of thorns. Books were burned, demons were nailed to gibbets, villages were razed to the ground…
Mind and body, body and soul – how could the battle end? How could peace ever be found, when the real combatants were irreconcilable, yet were both present in every faction and every army, chained eternally together?
60
But even amid this mayhem, there were small islands of peace. I came to a remote valley in Macedonia, where people went about their lives as if the outside world did not exist.
And there a peasant named Zhavkov befriended me. He was a widower, living with his daughter Leta. He was getting old and finding it hard to maintain his small farm. He gave me a bed in his loft and a seat at the family table if I would work for him.
He was a slow man and turned out to be an easy master to please. When I was incompetent, he enjoyed the feeling of superiority that it gave him. Yet when my competence exceeded his, that pleased him too. Far from feeling put down, he congratulated himself on his own cunning in acquiring a farmhand from the legendary City where they could make machines talk and destroy their enemies with beams of light.
‘Perhaps we could plant the tomatoes over here?’ I’d say, ‘They’ll get more shelter and catch more rain when it falls.’
He would slowly consider. He knew only one way of doing anything and that was the way his father had done it and his father before that, even if that meant walking round three sides of a field instead of taking the direct line. So new ideas, derived from a fresh analysis of the problem, seemed almost magical to him.
Slowly he would smile.
‘Well, and why not? That’s not a bad idea, not a bad idea at all.’
And he’d beam at me, nodding slowly many, many times.
‘They say old Zhavkov is a fool,’ he’d chuckle, ‘but who else has a real Scientist from the City to help him? You tell me that!’
Leta too was pleased by me. Everything about me intrigued her, and what began with good-natured teasing, soon became knowing looks, accidental touchings, small treats set aside in the kitchen for when I came in.
This wasn’t discouraged by Zhavkov. He would nudge me knowingly when we were out in the fields together.
‘You seem to have made a good impression on my Leta,’ he would say, ‘not such a bad-looking girl is she? She’s turned away more than one young lover in her time I can tell you.’
It was true. She was pretty in a plump, cheerful way. And she was sweet-natured, though slow and unsophisticated like her father. I enjoyed her interest in me at first and didn’t discourage her flirtations.
One day, when we were alone in the house, she engineered a playfight with me over a sweet cake, which ended up with her in my arms. We kissed. We became aroused. Laughter became breathless.
Then Leta took my hand and led me up to her tiny room. She unbuttoned her dress. Out tumbled her big soft breasts. And then she smiled kindly, seeing me hesitate, and gently took my hands and placed them over her thick, dark nipples.
Quite suddenly, and with horrible vividness, the image came into my mind of Lucy tearing away her breasts and revealing the dead plastic shell beneath, with plastic tubes oozing yellowish liquids…
I pulled back abruptly from Leta. Her smile turned to dismay. Mumbling apologies I collected my few things from the loft…
61
Some weeks later, I climbed off a dilapidated bus in a mountainside village in Montenegro, reputed to be another island of peace. The bus came this way only once a week and was soon surrounded by villagers, unloading purchases, greeting returning travellers, climbing on board for the return journey. I was hot and weary and seeing a concrete water tank in the middle of an apple orchard, I made my way down to it, kicked off my broken old shoes, and climbed into the cool green water.
After the initial cold shock, the coolness was enchanting, and I lay back and let it spread through me. I could still hear the villagers talking and shouting on the road by the bus, but the peaceful dreamy sound of a single skylark twittering straight above me seemed more significant than all the talking and shouting in the world.
‘Well, look at me!’ I said to myself, as I finally pulled myself out of the tank and settled myself down in the shady grass under a tree. ‘I’ve found my vocation. I’ve become a hobo.’